Recent Articleshttps://prospect.org/authors/127179/rss.xml
The American Prospect - articles by authorenThe Obscure Heroes Behind Congress’s Great Momenthttps://prospect.org/article/obscure-heroes-behind-congress%E2%80%99s-great-moment
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">O</span>n Tuesday July 2, 1963, Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall caught an early morning flight to Dayton, Ohio. Six days before, Marshall’s boss, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had appeared before a House Judiciary Subcommittee to present the newly introduced civil-rights bill that his brother, President John F. Kennedy, had committed himself to enacting during a powerful nationwide television address on June 11.</p>
<p>The Kennedy brothers’ outspoken attachment to advancing racial equality was entirely newfound. For the first two years of the Kennedy administration, civil-rights activists had been repeatedly disappointed by the brothers’ unwillingness to live up to the promises John Kennedy had voiced during the 1960 presidential campaign. Only the horrific violence visited upon interracial groups of “Freedom Riders” in May 1961, as they sought desegregation of interstate bus stations, and white racists’ attacks upon federal officers during the October 1962 desegregation of the University of Mississippi, had forced the Kennedys to take decisive yet short-lived action to support racial change.</p>
<p>In May 1963, civil-rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama—or, more precisely, city Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor’s use of high-pressure fire hoses and snarling police dogs against them—put Southern segregationist violence on the nation’s front pages and evening news broadcasts day after day as never before. Until then, neither Kennedy brother had shown any serious interest in putting forward significant civil-rights legislation, but within the space of a few weeks first Robert and then John changed his thinking, and the president’s June 11 televised speech conveyed the depth of that change to civil-rights supporters and opponents alike.</p>
<p>After Marshall landed in Dayton on July 2, a young man drove him 30 minutes north to the small town of Piqua, where his father-in-law kept a law office. The father-in-law was U.S. Representative William McCulloch, a 61-year-old conservative Republican who for 15 years had held a safe seat and had risen to be the ranking minority member on the House Judiciary Committee. Marshall and the administration’s other leading civil-rights strategist, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, appreciated that any chance of passing the Kennedy civil-rights bill depended upon two Republicans: McCulloch and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois. That understanding was what had led Marshall to Piqua. McCulloch was a veteran of Congress’s passage of two largely innocuous civil-rights bills in 1957 and 1960, when stronger House measures had been watered down in order to achieve Senate passage and win supposed Democratic victories. Those painful experiences led him to voice two simple demands. McCulloch would support the administration’s muscular bill so long as Marshall promised that what the House approved would not again be traded away in the Senate and that if the bill did become a law, the Kennedy brothers—with the next presidential election just 16 months away—would give Republicans equal credit. Marshall readily agreed, the two men shook hands, and Marshall headed back to Washington.</p>
<p>The most important day trip in American history, as Marshall’s excursion might be called, set the stage for a presidential signing ceremony that took place 365 days later: On July 2, 1964, John Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. The bill’s most famous provision, Title II, mandated the immediate desegregation of all public accommodations, including restaurants, motels, and stores. Two other provisions, Titles VI and VII, would within several years’ time force the desegregation of Southern public schools and the integration of industrial workforces across the South.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he undeviatingly bipartisan path through that pivotal year had been sealed in Piqua. Marshall and Katzenbach knew that McCulloch, along with House Minority Leader Charles Halleck of Indiana, another conservative Republican, would be more crucial allies than aging Judiciary Committee chair Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn or the distant House speaker, John McCormack of Massachusetts. Onlookers unaware of the Marshall-McCulloch pact, including <em>The New York Times</em>’s congressional correspondent and the Senate Democrats’ top staffer, opined that there was virtually no chance of Congress passing a powerful desegregation bill. Even after the March on Washington occurred on August 28, 1963, with a quarter-million upbeat participants and nary a hitch, conventional wisdom continued to dismiss the bill’s chances.</p>
<p>Most narratives of the bill’s progress move next to the immediate aftermath of John Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, but Clay Risen’s valuable history of the law’s passage, <em>The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act</em>, draws attention to two conferences in support of the bill that the National Council of Churches (NCC) convened in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Des Moines, Iowa, in early September 1963. Many accounts of 1960s congressional politics cite both NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell and Leadership Council for Civil Rights and United Auto Workers attorney Joseph L. Rauh, an irrepressible liberal, as significant behind-the-scenes players, but both Risen’s book and Todd Purdum’s <em>An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 </em>rightly credit the NCC and other affiliated religious activists as being far and away the most important voices calling upon members of Congress to act.</p>
<p>Their importance was rooted in the political fact that conservative Midwestern and Great Plains Republicans would be decisive to the bill’s fate in the House and even more so in the Senate. With a significant proportion of congressional Democrats hailing from Southern states whose racially discriminatory voter-registration practices meant that elected officials answered to almost entirely white electorates, majority coalitions to support the bill would require dozens of Republicans. That reality led Marshall and Katzenbach to oppose civil-rights proponents’ efforts to strengthen the bill in Celler’s committee beyond what could pass on the House floor and in the Senate. When President Johnson used his initial speech to a joint session of Congress to declare that “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest passage of the civil-rights bill for which he fought so long,” the measure’s national prominence was further elevated, and within weeks crucial Republican support fell into place in the House.</p>
<p>On February 10, 1964, with William McCulloch as the floor general, the House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 290 to 130. More instructive than the overwhelming margin, however, was the composition of the majority: 138 Republicans backed the bill along with 152 Democrats; only 34 Republicans joined 96 Democrats in voting against it.</p>
<p>From there the measure moved to the Senate, where Katzenbach and Marshall’s closest ally, liberal Minnesota Democrat Hubert Humphrey, shared their appreciation that the key was Republican Minority Leader Dirksen. Humphrey also understood that civil-rights lobbyists Mitchell and Rauh had to be kept at arm’s length and that the most influential outside pressure would come from the church groups and clergy members, especially those from the home states of conservative Republicans.</p>
<p>Everett McKinley Dirksen was a vain, florid, and hard-drinking politician, but above all he was a politician aware of how history would judge him, and even before John Kennedy’s death he had intimated to Katzenbach that in the end, the bill would receive his backing. Many Senate aides were unable to imagine how the 67 votes necessary to shut down the segregationist senators’ inevitable filibuster could be obtained, but on April 21 Dirksen privately told Humphrey that, with some changes, the bill had his support. Intensive private negotiations between Dirksen, Katzenbach, and various aides took place in early May, and on May 26 Dirksen introduced the revamped bill, whose modest changes reflected Dirksen’s ego rather than substantive alterations.</p>
<p>With the bill on the Senate floor, all eyes turned toward whether enough conservative Republicans, plus a handful of conservative Western Democrats, would vote to end debate on the bill, or for “cloture” in the Senate’s unique parlance, thus effectively passing the bill. Nationally obscure senators like Iowa Republican Bourke Hickenlooper held the balance, and in case after case the religious groups’ ardent support for racial equality proved decisive. When the penultimate vote for cloture was called on June 10—with CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd providing a nationally televised vote-by-vote tally from just outside the Capitol—proponents prevailed with four votes to spare, 71 to 29. Only six Republicans voted no, including the party’s upcoming presidential nominee, Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, whose opposition would contribute heavily to his landslide November loss to Lyndon Johnson.</p>
<p>On July 2, 1964, with congressional proponents and civil-rights leaders in attendance, Johnson signed the act into law. Title II’s prohibition of segregated facilities took immediate effect, and across the South compliance was widespread though not instantly unanimous. Several years later, when McCulloch’s declining health forced him to announce his retirement from Congress, a most unlikely correspondent wrote to praise him for what she called “the shining gift of your nobility.” Presidential widow Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was never known for overt political involvement, yet she told McCulloch that “I know that you, more than anyone, were responsible for the civil rights legislation” that she, like the rest of the world, viewed as her late husband’s most indelible legacy.</p>
<p>Risen accurately terms the 1964 act “the single most important piece of legislation passed in twentieth-century America,” but the law’s passage must be seen as a triumph of historically minded bipartisan cooperation as much as a landmark victory in the struggle for a nondiscriminatory world. As the 50th anniversary of the signing approaches, praise and recognition for McCulloch and Dirksen will be replete—as it should be too for Katzenbach, Marshall, Humphrey, and Halleck. But the most obvious comparison cannot be avoided: How, 50 years from now, will history judge House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, or for that matter House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid? By the McCulloch-Dirksen standard, all four not only pale into insignificance but merit large, boldface stamps as “failures.” McCulloch and Dirksen, with their eyes on the historical future, rose above partisan loyalties and parochial limitations to serve the national interest irrespective of short-term political considerations.</p>
<p>The most powerful lesson of these two remarkably similar books is how superior the quality of Washington political leadership was 50 years ago compared to today. Risen rightly calls the 1964 act “an example of what the country’s legislative machinery was once capable of,” and if every member of Congress, plus Barack Obama and various presidential staffers were required upon pain of imprisonment to read one or the other of these books, perhaps the looming light of history’s judgment would dawn on even the dimmest of political bulbs.</p>
<p>Risen’s and Purdum’s accounts do not differ on the fundamental lessons we should draw from 1964’s grand triumph. Risen correctly emphasizes that the conventional wisdom about the law’s passage overstates Lyndon Johnson’s direct involvement and the credit due him. “Johnson’s contribution to the bill’s success was largely symbolic,” Risen writes, and “there is little evidence that he did much to sway many votes.” Purdum disagrees, asserting that “Johnson did indeed help round up crucial votes for cloture” but that discord is modest in the extreme. Risen’s is, by some margin, a more acute and energetic chronicle than Purdum’s, yet Risen can intensely frustrate an attentive reader when he repeatedly violates chronology in narrating some portions of the story: In 1963 he cites events that occurred on April 23, April 19, May 3, May 9, May 6, June 11, May 4, June 2, May 28, and May 7—in that order! He also misstates the first names, home states, or political leanings of at least five different members of Congress.</p>
<p>Yet both books present a challenge not to our historical memory but to today’s national political leaders, and indeed one that directly echoes the pointed message of former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates’s powerful recent memoir, <em>Duty</em>: Are you, John Boehner, or you, Harry Reid, or you, Barack Obama, <em>personally</em> capable of rising above selfish, short-term, partisan calculations, as Bill McCulloch and Everett Dirksen so famously did, particularly if you stop and ponder how history, 50 years from now, will judge your time in office? That’s the question that the bipartisan legacy of the 1964 Civil Rights Act poses to today’s Washington. I’m not holding my breath.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 03 Apr 2014 12:37:28 +0000220057 at https://prospect.orgDavid J. GarrowShe's No Robertshttps://prospect.org/article/shes-no-roberts
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>One individual stands between Harriet Miers and a seat on the U. S. Supreme Court, and it's not Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, or Teddy Kennedy. It's newly confirmed Chief Justice John Roberts.</p>
<p>Miers is no less qualified for a seat on the high court than were a host of recent justices. In 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor's résumé as an Arizona judge and former state legislator was far from overwhelming. Ditto for David Souter's little-known New Hampshire pedigree in 1990, to say nothing of Clarence Thomas's record in 1991. In 1971, William Rehnquist was plucked from obscurity in the U. S. Department of Justice, and Lewis Powell, nominated at that same time, had, like Rehnquist, no judicial experience whatsoever. Go back a bit further and the list grows: Abe Fortas' primary qualification in 1965 was his special-buddy status with President Lyndon Johnson, and in 1962, Byron White was best known as a former football star who'd worked on John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign. Ever heard of Charles Evans Whittaker? Probably not, but Dwight Eisenhower put him on the Court soon after Earl Warren and William J. Brennan. </p>
<p>Historically speaking, then, no one can argue that Miers is unqualified, or even underqualified, to be a Supreme Court justice. What's more, her record of professional accomplishment as a Texas attorney is undeniably striking, and comparing her to O'Connor as a female trailblazer is credible; being the first woman to head the Dallas and Texas bar associations may not seem like a big deal nowadays, but Texas, like Arizona, was certainly not the easiest place to be a young female lawyer back when women law students were a rare breed. Miers has worked loyally and discreetly for George W. Bush during both his presidency and his governorship, but Bush has done Miers no favor whatsoever in nominating her to the Court on the very same day that Roberts took his seat. </p>
<p>No matter how you feel about the merits of Roberts' selection, there's no denying that Miers' résumé looks awfully thin in comparison to his. Roberts graduated from Harvard Law School (notwithstanding just an “A-“ from Laurence Tribe in constitutional law), Miers from Southern Methodist. Roberts clerked for then-Justice Rehnquist, Miers for Dallas federal district Judge Joe Estes. Roberts went to work for U. S. Attorney General William French Smith and then President Reagan; Miers worked at a large Dallas law firm. Roberts became a top attorney in the solicitor general's office and went on to argue 39 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court; Miers has never argued a single case before the Court. Roberts moved from being a premier Supreme Court advocate to being a judge on the top-drawer U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; Miers moved from being head of the Texas Lottery Commission to being White House staff secretary and then counsel. </p>
<p>It's no put-down of Harriet Miers to say that she's no John Roberts. Once Roberts' nomination was announced, Supreme Court insiders from the justices on down praised the qualifications of someone they all knew well. Miers, however, is a complete unknown, not only at the Court but to everyone else in Washington outside of the White House staff. </p>
<p>Roberts' nomination benefited tremendously from the high regard hundreds of elite Washingtonians had for him; Miers has no comparable friendship network whatsoever on which she can draw. Miers may very well receive public encomiums from leading Texas lawyers of all political stripes, and it's likely that the American Bar Association will likewise pronounce her qualified for confirmation. And Democratic opposition to Miers will be badly hamstrung by her almost complete lack of any "paper trail,” and efforts to portray her as a partisan Bush lackey will be significantly undercut by her past campaign contributions to Al Gore and Lloyd Bentsen. But Miers' biggest hurdle lies in how extensively she'll be compared to Roberts, especially once her hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee get under way. </p>
<p>Roberts had the benefit of 25 years' immersion in the cases and doctrines that come before the high court, and it showed during his testimony; Miers will begin her confirmation process with no such knowledge or expertise. However many weeks pass before her hearings commence, Miers will need to burn the midnight oil night after night in order to get herself up to speed for questions that Roberts confronted almost effortlessly. While it's true that, in theory, Miers has little to fear from Judiciary Committee Democrats (with the possible exceptions of Joe Biden and Russ Feingold, none has the legal wherewithal to make any nominee seem embarrassingly unschooled), she nonetheless ought to view her hearings with considerable dread. The questions may be easy. But if she comes across as having dramatically less legal expertise and self-assurance than Roberts, Senate Democrats will pounce on her simply in order to grievously wound the president who's nominated her. </p>
<p>Think back, if you're old enough, to those weeks in 1990 after then-President George Bush Senior nominated Souter but before Souter's Senate testimony began. Virtually no one, aside from Souter's personal friends in New Hampshire, had any great confidence that the unknown nominee would impress, or indeed wow, dubious and ambivalent senators. Yet within the first two days of Souter's testimony, it became clear to the vast majority of onlookers, and senators, that Souter possessed the intellectual acumen and thoughtfulness expected of a justice. </p>
<p>That's the question that will hang fire until Miers first begins speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the weeks ahead we'll learn much about the cases she handled as a private attorney, about her work for Bush in Texas, and about her bipartisan campaign contributions, but it's unlikely that the fate of this nomination will be any clearer the day before the hearings begin than it is now. Instead, everything -- or almost everything -- will hinge on Miers' performance before the committee. Once those hearings begin, everyone will know in a matter of hours whether or not she'll be confirmed. </p>
<p>If, like Souter, Miers demonstrates that she possesses the legal depth and intellectual firepower expected of a justice, that, plus her lack of a paper trail, could produce a Senate confirmation margin not too different from Roberts' own 78-to-22 tally. But if she seems hopelessly out of her depth when compared to Roberts, it's imaginable that support for her nomination could collapse so quickly and widely that she'll withdraw. Either scenario is plausible. </p>
<p>Miers may win popular accolades, or she may become a painful embarrassment to an already badly weakened president. Bush certainly believes he knows Miers well enough that there's no doubt about the outcome, but to the rest of us, her nomination is a role of the dice. Only one thing is certain: Miers holds the outcome to this mystery in her own hands. She will either succeed, like Souter and Roberts, or she will crash and burn. A good bit of history's verdict on the Bush presidency hangs in the balance.</p>
<p><i>David J. Garrow is the author of Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade and writes extensively on the U. S. Supreme Court. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for Bearing the Cross, his biography of Martin Luther King Jr., and is now a senior fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 04 Oct 2005 11:25:59 +0000144902 at https://prospect.orgDavid J. Garrow